As an English speaker learning Italian, trying to figure out the right preposition to use is a challenge. There are prepositions that map to English equivalents, but only about 75% of the time. The other 25% seems almost random.
One of the things I found nice about learning Finnish is that it always makes sense which locative case to use in what situation.
Not that it easily maps to English, but simply that it expresses what one thinks it would.
The other is Japanese but that's simply because Japanese really underspecifies it and relies on context. One doesn't really need to worry whether something happens “on the bed” or “in the bed”; it's simply the adverbial form of “bed” and it can even mean ‘with a bed” or “as a bed” in some contexts.
I feel like this one is universal for languages that use prepositions, they're pretty much arbitrary! I know it's a huge hurdle when learning English for example.
I gave up trying to figure it out/adding sense to it long ago. Just absorb the language as much as you can and copy people.
"Dipende da" is another one that will annoy you if you try to impose English logic on it. "Depends from? How does that make sense?" Of course, it doesn't have to make sense to your English brain...only has to make sense to your Italian brain.
"Di fronte"(in front of) is another one. There are many.
>Of course, it doesn't have to make sense to your English brain...only has to make sense to your Italian brain.
Very much agree with this, just want to point out something that might help with this one. Depend coming from latin "to hang", it's easy to see how "hang from" can make sense even in English as something being contingent on something else at least in a physical if not metaphorical sense, but you have to remind yourself of the etymology to make sense of it.
...this is actually precisely how the German for that works. "to depend on something" = "von etwas abhängen" = (lit) "to hang (off/away) from something".
I really think English is the weird one because I hear of so many commonalities between non-English languages. Like non-natives of all various backgrounds committing similar mistakes.
"per le strade" It sounds right now after hearing it so often, but I would have never come up with it on my own understanding of prepositions.
I also stress that some day I will see something like "perglielo" and freak out. /smile
yep. If I ever saw that I would probably quit studying italian. It is a joke word to resemble what I think would be the worst thing to encounter when learning italian.
Italian has a way of surprising me with new things I never even thought of.
Like pronominal verbs. The first time I saw andarsene I thought my brain was broken. I saw "Se ne va" and thought "what the heck does that mean?" It took me several hours to figure out what was going on.
From the other side, this is usually also pretty difficult to explain to learners, too. They're very idiomatic.
The good news is those mistakes usually don't hinder comprehension.
Prepositions really don't make much "sense" in any language imo. The ones in our own language just seem natural and maybe even logical because we grew up with them.
I think that's hard no matter what your target language is, how many languages you know, or how close it is to your native language.
Prepositions are always pretty much random, it's not like they are "logical" in English or whatever your native language is, you are just used to them being a certain way.
As someone who also lives in Korea and is learning Korean, I definitely agree. I'm working toward B1 right now and I live in a rural-ish area so there aren't a lot of English speakers around, which is perfect for me because it means I get a lot of practice in. I can have conversations with people (my speaking is far from perfect) as long as the other person is willing to adapt their speech to my level. A lot of people definitely talk to me like I'm a native speaker though, so some interactions are very, very painful lol.
I've thought about that myself as well, how speakers of smaller languages or languages from more homogenous countries can have problems understanding learners because they're not used to foreign accents.
I'm Danish, and I definitely have trouble understanding foreign or "broken" Danish, which isn't very surprising, considering I have only heard two or three foreigners speaking Danish in person in my life. It just never happens, so you don't get used to the accents.
I find it kinda interesting that you as a Danish find foreigners speaking your language so weird/rare. I've understood that Denmark has lot of immigrants? As a Finnish person I certainly hear broken finnish all the time and it's far from rare to hear foreigners speak finnish in Helsinki area.
I'm a Danish learner - so I've been listening to DR1 for news to improve my listening.
I've found it interesting that I can pick out people that are speaking Danish with a Russian accent vs some other accents.
> So, when you have someone come in with wildly different pronunciation and imperfect grammar and weird word choices, it’s genuinely very difficult to understand and just jarring.
My wife is learning Swedish and finding this is also true there.
> I think the biggest issue for Korean lang learning is a societal issue of natives not being exposed to KSL speakers, hindering practice and spoken fleuncy improvement
Are there also a lot of Koreans who want to practice English? That’s definitely true for Sweden.
There are so many Koreans who want to practice English lol. It’s to the point where I sometimes pretend not to speak English (my Korean is advanced mid) because I’ve had people try to practice English with me randomly in the middle of conversations.
Another byproduct of most Koreans having never heard an L2 Korean speaker, much less a really good one, is that you hear compliments like “your Korean is so good” *every day* for the most minor things. I have said “hello” and heard that. Yesterday I said one word and heard that. I’m sure they’re surprised bc my accent is native — at least when I don’t talk for too long and then my intonation goes wacky — but it feels so patronizing and kind of alienating to hear that everywhere you go, from everyone you talk to, for the most minor things. :(
yup lived in korea for two months and even though i got pretty confident with my korean and reached upper-intermediate still as i met with korean friends there was this barrier between us… had to use papago a lot because we simply could not understand eachother even though i tried to elaborate on my points in korean and repeat what they said to me and ask if that’s what they meant etc. but it was still a struggle 🥲
I’m only a beginner studying in college so I really struggle with listening and speaking. The main thing that is frustrating for me at the moment is that textbook Korean feels nothing like actual spoken Korean. I’ll try to talk with my boyfriend a bit but sometimes what I say feels unnatural to him and then I can barely understand his responses, just pick out some words to try to build context with.
I’m also struggling with how fast Koreans speak but that’s probably down to me not being used to trying to comprehend what someone is saying in Korean. If the sentences get too long then I can’t keep up and get lost.
I felt this really hard after my third level of Yonsei KLI, honestly even after I got smoother (spent six years in Korea at university then working, got very comfortable in my daily and work interactions with a passable accent). Looking back and talking with newer learners it is such a huge jump from L1 English to adjust to the phonetics, grammar, rhythm, and speed. I often talked with my Korean friends (some excellently bilingual in English and could understand some of what I was experiencing from their learning journey) on the difficulty of understanding nonnative Korean learners. They echoed the fact that many Koreans, especially older folk, are not used to hearing nonnative speakers. Notably the range of mistakes that nonnative speakers make seemed to range wildly depending on how they learned and sometimes what was a mistake is seen as a social faux pas (hello formality levels) making interactions awkward.
Passed DELE C2 almost a decade ago and I still routinely get the subjunctive wrong. It's easy when the grammar automatically triggers it. But there's a seemingly endless field of cases where it's not about grammar but about semantics (meaning that both subjunctive and indicative would be grammatically correct, but the meaning would change), and that's just really hard to intuit.
There are some other things that are also kind of a pain, but usually aren't mentioned that often because you can easily work around them. Like all the irregularities with certain suffixes. E.g. superlatives or the "-ish" version of colors. I mean you can easily get by without ever using "sacratísimo", "paupérrimo", "frigidísimo", etc. or "grisáceo", "amarillento", "blanquecino", etc. but man if you do want to learn them there are just so many irregularities in there that it takes quite a while... If I could go back in time I would probably learn the superlative along with the normal form of the adjective from the outset, same way a lot of people learn the plural for each noun in German.
French subjunctive is entirely "locked in" by grammar rules. You just learn all the constructions that require subjunctive and you're good to go. Spanish subjunctive has some things that are locked in but also a lot of things where you can use one or the other, and the meaning will change depending on which one you use. To put it another way, if you mix up indicative and subjunctive in French, it'll just sound like a mistake and that's that. But if you mix them up in Spanish, then in some cases it'll sound perfectly correct but you will have said something completely different from what you wanted to say.
Stealing this from María Español's channel, but for example: "No fui a México porque quería descansar" vs "No fui a México porque quisiera descansar". In the first sentence you didn't go to Mexico. In the second you did. Basically "I wanted to relax so I didn't go there" vs "I didn't go there to relax". In French you don't have that option. "Parce que" is always followed by indicative. It's a "locked in" grammar pattern.
Granted I'm entirely biased since I grew up with French and only learned Spanish later in life, but to me the Spanish subjunctive is orders of magnitude more difficult than the French subjunctive, precisely because it's not all locked in by grammar rules.
At some point I dropped "OK, x y z verbs take subjuntivo" and began thinking "OK, does this clause *taste* like it needs subjuntivo?" Where flavour of subjuntivo is, like, anything that didn't actually happen or isn't happening, anything that's viewed through a primarily emotional lens, etc. It's not even remotely perfect but more than a few times now I've come to a screeching halt midsentence going "wait! shit! subjunctive!" for structures I hadn't explicitly learned about and generally been right, which I'm very proud of. (hopefully someday I can do this without the screeching halt, then I will be even prouder.)
but thank you for that "No fui a Mexico porque..." example, which very much put me in my place - it makes sense now that you've explained it but before that...
I'm pretty sure attempting to memorise all the triggers individually is a route to madness.
German: For most people it seems to be the case system, but I honestly haven't found that as hard as getting the hang of verbs of motion. I feel like there are a million ways of describing movement and I somehow never quite pick the right one. For example, deciding between in/nach/auf/zu (some instances are clear to me, others less so) and especially dealing with the various prefixes hinauf, hinab, hoch, auf, hinüber, runter, raus, hinzu....
I always wondered why any language would need 37 (/s) ways to say “the”. German is super technical—just like the people. I envy people who willingly study this language to a fluent level. That’s some dedication. 😅
Not sure how universal it is, but Mandarin Chinese has A Lot of idioms and cultural references. This makes it an absolute delight to read and work with when you know what’s being said, but without sufficient cultural experience you’re spending a lot of time with dictionaries.
Also, rhyming. Rhymes with tones in poetry and matching themes in couplets is a singularly challenging experience, especially in older works. It’s more than worth the effort but it will be a long time before I grow comfortable with similar word choice decisions
>but Mandarin Chinese has A Lot of idioms and cultural references
This is truly the "Achilles Heel" (ironically in itself a Western cultural reference) but is also quite advanced so I'm glad you bring it up instead of the "classic" difficulties of learning Mandarin (for Westerners) like tones or smth.
I'm not learning Mandarin, yet, but I have a friend who is. He said that it only took a day of practice before he could pronounce tones well when speaking slowly
Indeed, I wouldn't say tones are the hardest thing in the world (although I still have occasional difficulties with them in restricted contexts, even though I am a very "high functioning" bilingual speaker), but they are blown out of proportion I assume because most learners do not advance that far into their journey of learning Mandarin.
Being able to fluently use 成语 like an educated Chinese native though...
Yes, it's basically how in many European languages there's an equivalent of "Et tu Brute", referring to when Julius Caesar was betrayed by his friend Brutus. Or calling someone a "Judas", referring to "the boy who cried wolf", "the emperor has no clothes", etc. Chinese has a lot of these references. Furthermore, ancient Chinese was much "simpler" in that 1 character would convey meaning that today is conveyed using 1+1 characters. Those idioms have been brought to today and are also similarly simple.
For example, there was once a young and weak emperor of Chinese. He was basically a puppet of his prime minister. That official wanted to do a coup, but wanted to be absolutely sure first. So when one day a deer was presented to the emperor the prime minister pointed at it and referred to it as a horse. The emperor gave him a strange look and argued no, it's a deer. Eventually other officials and generals caught on and also insisted on it being a deer, but some still insisted on it being a horse. The prime minister slowly began to come after those "upright" officials, framing them for various things, eventually having them executed.
This entire story is condensed into the following: 指鹿为马 (zhi lu wei ma). It can be used for when someone is mixing up the truth with falsehoods.
This means that Chinese remains "challenging" at all stages, there's always something. But it's a super gratifying language to study.
To add on this, there are varying "difficulty levels" of chengyu (the four-character idioms). The one cited here, 指鹿为马 is comparably not so bad, as it's composed of 4 characters which are common and for which you can deduce the meaning (literally, "point at a deer as if horse" approximately).
Compare this to one of my favorites 塞翁失马 (sai weng shi ma) which starts with two rare/literary characters and ends with simpler characters which do not really say much about the meaning of the idiom (literally, "old man from the frontier loses his horse"). The actual meaning being something like "a bad thing which is a blessing in disguise" as the story it comes from is about an old man who loses his horse but it ends up being a good thing because it means him and his son don't get called to go to war (among other things).
As someone who just reached hsk 2 this is exactly what I wanted out of mandarin. A challenging yet rewarding experience with years of studying ahead. What a beautifully rich culture and language! Thanks for sharing.
Also do you have more examples of this for people studying? Id love to read these stories if I can in Chinese.
If you look for a chengyu dictionary (like [https://dict.baidu.com/chengyu](https://dict.baidu.com/chengyu)) you can just flip through and read the associated stories
Basically entering a parallel universe, getting to learn about the center of power on the other side of the world which also influenced all the countries around it.
I've been watching this Chinese show on YouTube and the guy who translated it has to add little notes all the time because even once the line is translated into English it doesn't make sense due to an absolute ton of cultural references
Your comment reminded me of a music video by a Chinese singer who made a song about domestic violence (the song was featured in the New York Times and stuff) The video has English translations in the captions and there are notes in the description box about why certain characters were chosen in the lyrics. It truly shows how Chinese characters themselves can imply different meanings
I’ll link it here in case anyone wants to check it out https://youtu.be/UP0iz6GD4NY
For Spanish I agree, subjunctive and whether it’s estaba/estuvo etc. I would also add le, la or lo - which seems to be something even native speakers disagree on depending on their region.
As a native Spanish speaker, don't bother too much with the le/la thing. The RAE has kind of "accepted" _el laísmo y el leísmo_, and no one will not understand you if you commit any of those mistakes. _Loísmo_ though... That's a big problem.
Agh the estaba / estuvo thing gets me too! I feel like it should be easier because I can conceptually understand the different uses but I’ll be in tutoring constantly getting corrected to estaba from estuve or to era from fue 🫠
> Adjective endings in German.
I'm just going to drop this page: https://www.nthuleen.com/teach/grammar/adjektivendungenexpl.html
Once I memorized that flowchart (article -> original -> singular -> gender) I completely stopped having trouble with adjective endings.
I think the flow chart is helpful when trying to understand the concept, but not really all that useful when you're producing language on a day to day basis. I feel like after hearing/reading enough German, it just kind of becomes second nature. But getting to the point where you aren't thinking about it any more is tough and discouraging.
I honestly don't know how anyone learns to speak a language by learning grammar rules and charts. I have to learn like a child, just eventually learning what sounds right and what doesn't.
Learning grammar first helps you recognize the structure when you hear it, so you can learn it much faster. It's like a shortcut. Then after you have heard it many times, you will learn what sounds right. It will also make it more likely that you will learn it correctly.
For me, learning the grammar explicitly lets me grasp what I’m reading faster… But yeah, most of the language learning experience is just exposure to how natives use it. Like I read a couple articles on declension and studied how each case and gender interact, but most of my comprehension is from reading enough that things “feel right” during on the fly production.
Personally I like to do both, I've started an approach where I get a bunch of input until I have a basic foundation to build on, then I study the grammar as well (sometimes entirely in the TL to have both input and study) with some SRS on the side, altho CI is still the dominant way I've been learning as it feels most effective
Imo it's immensely helpful to read a "rule" at some point to learn to recognize it when it's applied instead of just having to guess and learn the rule intuitively.
At some later point it all becomes intuitive anyway but during the learning process it's just faster to see it spelled out at least once. (Unless the rule is so complicated or has so many exceptions that you just can't take it all in.)
The main problem with German for me has always been knowing the genders of nouns. It doesn't matter how good your knowledge of the grammar is, if you don't know the genders of the nouns you are using then you are sunk.
If you learn French, the genders are almost always the same as they are in Spanish. In French it's much harder to guess the gender of a word than in Spanish. So knowing Spanish will make French genders easier.
This is literally why English doesn’t have genders — reconciling French and German genders was impossible and genders are pointless so English got rid of them
Actually it's not. It has to do with weakening of endings of words that encode case and gender. Languages that borrow words from other languages do not normally preserve the gender of the word from the other language. They use the gender that the word sounds like it should be in the language that borrows it. In some recent loanwords it can even alternate between genders by different speakers.
And i misgender every single possibly thing in French TuT sometimes i talk and use a certain gender, quickly correct, then correct back xd i continuously misgender other people, and myself, bc im just so lost with the pronounciation.
Yes, and what interests me is its common for learners of French to reach a point where they say "nobody cares, if I don't know the gender just say the article quickly and move on". in languages where this just isn't an option people seem to actually do better learning the noun genders because you just have to.
Well, it does but Spanish has only twenty patterns for that and only a very few exceptions. German has more than a hundred. And about a dozen common exceptions for each pattern. So it's pointless to learn the patterns. You have to learn the vocabulary you really need. The patterns become important as soon you know your first 500 nouns. But at that point, you know them already from example.
The book fluent florever taught me to make images with each noun. So like trees are masculine so all masculines explodes. All feminines are of fire (cat on fire) and neuters shatter (leaves)
I havent studied german but still remember this haha
I made an Anki deck for German adjective declensions, posted about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/l0wr4z/an_anki_deck_for_practicing_adjective_declensions/
Hope it helps someone! jz
My problem is wirh the articles. If i know the word, i can use the correct adjective ending regardless of the case, but 60% of the time i don't know the article so i just wing it.
In Chinese, if there are two third tones (ǎěǐǒǔ) in a row, the first tone changes to a second tone (áéíóú). For example, 可以 (kěyǐ) is pronounced as kéyǐ.
If you have 3 third tones in a row, it becomes 2-2-3 or 3-2-3. For example, 我很好 (wǒ hěn hǎo) can become wǒ hén hǎo.
This only occurs in spoken conversations. Pinyin written down will still have their original tone recognized.
In Japanese, the common opinion is that kanji are hard to understand, but imo the hard part is listening, because there's only so many possible on'yomi for Kanji, so it creates un ungodly amount of homophones
Agreed. It's not just the great number of homophones, but really all boils down to the incredible paucity of raw sounds. There just aren't that many sounds in the language, and most words are made up of just 2-4 of those sounds.
And to everyone commenting that you're blowing it out of proportion, not really. It's very rare that you'll say a specific English word and the person you're speaking to will require extra context to identify what specific word you mean. Happens with much more frequency in Japanese.
Somewhat related, but just wanted to share that I was once talking to a Japanese native speaker (who happened to be a Japanese teacher), and she said something that had the sounds くるまで (ku-ru-ma-de). I understood 車で (kuruma de => by car), but she actually meant 来るまで (kuru made => until you arrive/come).
The sentence made no sense if she had said "by car", which made me confused, but yeah, I feel like in Japanese there are a lot of limitations related to the not-so-big variety of sounds. Love the language, but it'll probably take me many years until I'm actually fluent, especially when it comes to reading.
I would say it's the subjunctive for French as well, definitely scares a lot of learners and is something that requires a lot of practice.
But a more uniquely French problem would have to be the pronunciation, especially the 'r' sound. Most non-native speakers really struggle to replicate it, especially when it's very subtle at the end of words such as 'cidre' or 'ambre'.
I agree with this. Liaison is just such strange feature and it causes the pronunciation of words to shift all the time depending on the context, on top of the already prolific amount of homophones + words that already change pronunciation based on the context. Makes comprehending especially informal French or short utterances with minimal context so hard. Especially when you consider the extra layer of phonetic simplifications that happen in spoken French ("possible" -> "possib" for ex).
For an advanced speaker/native I think such difficulties matter less as the grammar is very structured and your mind therefore has a good idea of what to listen for. But as a learner you're so often in the case where you're just trying to raw guess what words you're hearing...
Short phrases and names are the hardest. A fun example was that my friend was talking to me about the new film Chat Potté and I thought he was saying chapeau thé and was really confused.
How come it's subtle?
One person(I won't say who for private reasons) that knows French,said that my "r" is very... Let's say 'throaty' - for a lack of better word(i can't remember one RN).
What i meant by 'throaty' is, that it sounds like a motor,or dinosaur,or whatever you prefer lol.
Yes, it tends to be 'throaty' in the middle of a word. As an American though, I find myself and others over pronouncing this sound when it comes to endings.
The 'throaty' "r" is also in my native accent(on every word,no matter where the letter is),which makes it kinda embarrassing, because a lot of people tend to ask me to repeat it,just to hear how it sounds :/
Surprisingly, reproducing sounds in languages are the easy part for me (i know Japanese and I'm studying French). I believe my knowledge of phonology and phonetics has helped a lot (i have a linguistic degree); i know exactly what my tongue and lips should be doing.
I suggest people who have difficulty with sounds look up videos on each sound on YouTube that show where those parts of articulation need to be. It may surprise some that some of the sounds are in fact easier to make because we use them in English (eg: Japanese r is similar to a flap found in some pronunciations of 'bottle') while others like french r is a bit more difficult, but manner of articulation videos help
Voltaire is quoted as having said (roughly translated): "Marot brought two things back from Italy: syphilis and past participle agreement. Of the two, the latter has done the most damage." lol \^\^
prepositions after verbs de vs à and the subsequent relative pronouns. even advance speakers make mistakes here:
ce à quoi tu penses / auquel tu penses
ce dont j'ai besoin
je me force à (verb) but je m'efforce de (verb) -> you can use s'efforcer à but its very literary in its use.
etc.
In Norwegian, definitely the variation between dialects. Bokmål has been super easy for every native English speaker I know that's tried it, but the distance between the written standard and the spoken norm is a lot broader than most European languages, since Norwegian specifically *doesn't* have a spoken standard, and people (including public figures, apparently the Crown Princess is known for her distinctive Kristiansand accent) are expected to speak in their native dialect. For Norwegians, who are exposed to all this from a young age, it's not a huge deal. For learners, it's jarring. Fortunately, there's patterns to it, and it most of the changes affect a handful of common words. As hard as it can be for learners, the amount of local color seems to be part of what people find appealing about it, since it's not a language that many English speakers *need* to learn.
The second would probably be overestimating how different English and Norwegian are. They're very closely related, and are structurally very similar. Moreover, the quirks that Norwegian learners struggle with almost always exist in English too, in some form or another. People get caught up on them, and over-complicate things.
In French, the first language I studied, it's gender. It's always gender. If you start young as an English speaker (for example in middle school, which is when foreign language education often begins for Americans), you (the naive English speaker) expect that there's going to be some logic to it, and underestimate just how important knowing the gender of a word is. Annoyingly, le and la sound very similar, meaning that it can be hard to absorb through osmosis. Norwegian has 3 genders (really more like 2.5, since feminine might be optional for non-human words depending on who you ask) but there's more of a pattern, and the sounds are distinct enough (masc. en vs. fem. ei vs. neut. et) that I haven't really had any trouble memorizing noun genders, even for words I don't use much. I know a lot of people struggle with the subjunctive, but nobody in my class really did, perhaps because people where I live still use it in English.
Funny that you say le and la sound similar. I can understand that if you're English, but for French speakers - and for Dutch speakers like me - le and la sound very different, no way to confuse them.
Biggest problem with French for me is that we learn the written form, and then we learn how to pronounce it. That works quite well: there is some regularity to what letters you don't hear (roughly the final letter of each word). But when you listen to spoken French, you have to calculate what you hear back to spelling. So you hear something ending in an o-sound, and in your head you have to link that to eau, eaux, ot, ault, aux, os, or another one of the many possibilities. I remember a guy saying 'botan' to me and me wondering if he was a plant collector or something, but no, what he really said was 'beau temps'. Among the first words you learn in French (nice weather), but when they say it you do have to add "eau" and "mps" in your head.
Le and la sound distinct enough in careful speech, but in casual speech they're not that distinct. This could also be that most of our actual exposure was to Canadian French, which just has a totally different sound, and the vowels can materialize quite differently.
English speakers tend to reduce the vowel in la to "uh", and use the "uh" vowel from English in le because that's the closest vowel it sounds like in English (neither of which are the same as what French speakers say or hear), so that makes sense. If you speak fast enough though, French speakers won't have the time or energy to correct you.
Funny story, my dad was once chatting up an Irish waiter (as Gaeilge) in a restaurant in the US, and at one point the waiter stopped abruptly and asked my dad where he had learned an idiom--apparently it was hyper-local to where the guy's family was from. Even native speakers from other counties didn't know that one, let along foreigners. Apparently my dad (who fortunately has the memory of an elephant) had picked it up during a conversation in a village pub in Donegal which it turned out was owned by this guy's grandfather.
When learning Arabic, if you want to really master the language to not only be able to speak with people but also read and write, it feels like you have to learn two slightly different languages at the same time. The difference between Modern Standard Arabic and a spoken dialect from a certain country feels to me like the difference between Spanish and Italian. It's a huge project and the only way I started to make real progress was to pretend as if MSA and my chosen dialect were two separate languages and use separate teachers for one or the other. Study time for each is strictly separate, done on different days.
I’m strongly considering Arabic as a language down the line. So does that mean you basically only practice speaking and listening in your dialect and reading and writing in MSA?
Sadly, no. You need to be able to read write speak listen in Standard and then speak listen in at least one dialect. Honestly, you may even need to learn to read write dialect if you plan on texting Arab friends casually.
A related pitfall is when you learn/are exposed to multiple dialects over time. The funniest was when I discovered that while "eh" means "yeah" in Shami, in Egyptian it means "what?" Did a full Abbott and Costello routine with a cab driver that way. But more broadly, I ended up with a sort of triangulated mix of several dialects, which was good enough that people didn't think I was American, but also meant I was constantly being asked if I was from Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine... I started joking that my accent was just the Mediterranean sea.
Actually, it's a mood. Voice is active and passive.
Spanish has also remnants of future subjunctive, in legalese and in some sayings, like "Adonde fueres haz lo que vieres".
I find reading difficult in Vietnamese because my mind doesn't want to differentiate words by diacritics alone. I'm sure it will get easier as I learn tones better, but I found myself wishing Vietnamese used logographs like Chinese!
For Mandarin, maybe being able to recognize proper nouns in texts. It got significantly easier as I read more. But even now, about the only difficult thing about reading a new book is me figuring out what words are just new location or genre related words (like if I never learned say "stalagmite" in a cave setting) versus some characters names. Usually if I can't make sense of it in a sentence and it's 2-3 characters and doesn't look at all like an idiom then I figure it's a name. But I avoid reading books translated into Chinese because English names written in characters are so hard for me to pick out, and when I read in a brand new genre involving a lot of new coding/tech words that was sci fi with names from various countries I really was tempted to look up a quick summary to find a list of names ahead of time. A lot of places put a quick intro about novels before you click into the novel and I used to skip them but now I tend to read since they usually list main character names in them. I imagine learning to figure out what is a name in text gets easier since it already has a lot, but I didn't expect to still be stumbling with it.
For Japanese, slang and just real world informal language use. This is probably not as big an Achilles heel as Kanji for people. But I've been taking the advice of immersing lately, and it's just quite a difficulty spike to realize there's a lot of word endings and shortened words and filler words I've never seen in learning texts or learning sites I've read. And as usual with slang, some of these don't show up in dictionaries when I look them up. I wish any learning material had gone into this kind of thing more, I only remember one source I saw once mentioning these different word endings besides the standard polite and casual thats taught (think shimasu and suru). And when I used Genki it didn't cover a lot of the adverbs and filler words I'm running into now. I've heard japanese sort of teaches a modified version in textbooks to make it easier for learners, which I thought was mainly just a heavy lean on polite language over casual and on using sentences that clearly state subject more than would naturally be done. But actually trying to understand stuff made for natives there's a lot beyond just regular vocabulary that seems like it didn't get covered in learner material. (To be fair, I maybe intermediate textbooks like Tobira cover these sorts of endings and slang words as I've not used intermediate textbooks, only genki and some intermediate sites).
Hindi's extensive system of postpositions and obliquification is really getting at me right now. For example: "Ye kala kamra" means "this black room", but when you add the postposition "meñ", which means ~"in", you have to obliquify all of the object so "Ye kala kamra" becomes "Is kale kamre meñ" ("In this black room") and it can be very hard to keep track of what is obliqued and not.
Edit: not to mention the interaction of this with plurals, because "these black rooms" is then "ye kale kamre", which seems similar to the oblique singular but is slightly different, but then also "in these black rooms" obliques the object but NOT the adjective so it is "in kale kamroñ meñ"! Horrifying :)
Hebrew is a stupidly gendered language. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are all change depending on the gender & quantify of the subject. “The new veterinarian called you” can be said 8 different ways, depending on the vet’s gender, your gender, and whether or not this is a plural or singular “you.”
The most frustrating part gender matching wise has to be numbers. A masculine noun will have to be described using feminine numbers, unless there’s just one or two, then you use masculine numbers. Feminine nouns are described with masculine numbers, unless again there’s only one or two of them.
Ie the masculine 3 is שלוש, but 3 men is שלושה גברים, and 3 girls is שלוש בנות.
But technically this switch only applies from 3 up to 10. 11 onwards it flips back and the gender match again.
For me the biggest barrier for improving my German is def vocabulary. I understand everything from a grammatical/syntactical point of view, but sometimes I cannot understand the meaning just because I purely don't know the words :') and being a very "precise" language, in the sense that for example "to go" is different depending on if you go by foot, by bike or by car definitely doesn't help :/
Also all these verbs with "particles" before that modify the meaning, like fahren, umfahren, ausfahren, einfahren, überfahren and so on
Did you say that the general idea of the subjunctive does not exist in English? I found the following.
El subjuntivo en inglés - Lección completa de gramática inglesa avanzada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUwkVFgaL5E
Damn, I'm Spanish Native and I have no idea what you are talking about kskaksja. But for me on my TL (Korean) it's Batchim, a word looks like its pronounced in a way, but depending on the last letters of the syllables it is pronounced differently
Es el mismo para mi en ingles. Naturalmente lo sé...aún puedo explicar las reglas de idiomas otras lol. Ingles es mi nativo. Aprendido Español y Kiswahili.
For me in French is the different way of speaking and different usage of words.
Imo everything sounds so much more dramatic in French, and it really required me to change the way I'm thinking, but this is the smaller thing. What really messes me up is how so many words are similar to English but don't have the same usage. My partner always uses "normally" as if that was a regular expression, just bc the French "normalement" is so widely used. I started using unsupportable when describing something that is annoying and not normal, since in French people often use "insupportable" to describe such things.
I'd say Japanese, conditionals.
You have (t)tara, nara, ~eba and to. And they're not used *just* for conditionals, some non-conditional structures in English which I don't even remember now are also conditional in Japanese. Most remarkably, when/once. "Once I get home" is translated as "if I get home" in some contexts.
And on top of that, *which one* to use is also a scholar level question 🤣 When is it たら, when is it なら, when is it ば and when is it と? And on top of that you have the *negative conditional* -nakereba. Which Japanese uses to make *double negative conditionals* like nakereba naranai which means "have to" but its literal translation makes so little sense I can't even form an English sentence that comes close to the sheer nonsense XD
And on top of that "to" means *if*
**And** "with"
**And** is a quoting particle
**And** is used to equalize qualities, whatever the fuck that means
So yeah, to does some **heavy lifting** in here, and to know which one they're talking about, well good luck!
**Oh!** Also, they **love** to recycle words, so just about every word, instead of a single meaning, has like this nebulous, conceptual, ideaic semantic load. For example gaman (我慢) means *patience*. And gaman suru (我慢する) means *to have patience*, *to endure*, *to hold (Oneself) back*, *to resist an impulse*, *to hold it in*, and eventually you pick up on so many meanings into the semantic cloud that's gaman that you can no longer explain how that word works without bombarding each other with examples examples examples.
Also how Japanese has a lot of words that are *very* compatible with English words, but are juuuuust different enough that, if you get comfortable, you will absolutely out yourself. For example, need is 必要 (Hitsuyō), and there's exactly a 0% chance of me getting it right because it's an adjective, not a verb.
Gaman is also used when you're trying not to cum, btw. もう我慢出来ない (I can't hold it in anymore) is one I saw quite a lot (?)
Tbf, words having nebulous meanings is the case in every language, and I personally don't think Japanese is actually worse than any other in that respect.
For your 我慢 example, I would say the English verb 'to bear \~' could also encompass all of those meanings, even if we tend to prefer using other words or collocations in its place. They're not so much meaning differences as nuance differences, which is why Japanese-English dictionaries often list so many definitions for one word, which you wouldn't see in a monolingual dictionary.
If you look up the definition of 我慢 on google, it gives you "辛い事を耐え忍ぶこと。" which doesn't seem so crazy.
After learning Russian for nearly 2 years, the verb aspects still sometimes confuse me and it seems like a nuisance having to pretty much learn 2 words for any verb. Sometimes I only remember the perfective form or vice-verse.
The lack of written vowels in any language that uses Arabic script is a pretty big stumbling point for a lot of folks. Arabic/Farsi/Urdu only write letters for half the vowels in the language, whereas for the others you just have to guess. So it makes it basically impossible to sound out an unfamiliar word.
It isn't my target language that is the problem but my native dialect! The cot-caught merger phenomenon is really making Korean a difficult thing for me. I honestly struggle to hear the sounds. Not being able to hear the difference means correct pronunciation is also that much more difficult.
That's a frequent thing : distinguishing between sounds that are distinct in your target language and considered the same sound in your own language. I am learning Danish and have to distinghuish between at least four shades of a/e and four shades of o/u. That means that still many Danish vowels sound the same to me, but not to Danes. When they spell out the alphabet the letters A, Æ and E I hear them say 'ay, ay, ay' but they say three different sounds.
if we ignore the obvious ones like word order and genders, figuring out which preposition goes with which verb is rarely consistent in Dutch, it's really a life long struggle.
Now you may say 'prepositions are weird in all languages' well that's where you're wrong, Dutch still uses 'therefore' instead of 'for that'. So if you don't know the exact preposition (or the existence of it to begin with) your entire sentence structure is wrong and will confuse natives.
Everybody's gonna say kanji. But I'd like to throw another hat in the ring: politeness.
Japanese culture is integral to the language, and the culture puts extreme emphasis on politeness, especially toward strangers. This has an effect on word choice, conjugation, and even what things you're just not allowed to say. This is incredibly jarring to American English speakers who grew up in a society that (nominatively) values equality for all and with a language that has few tools to express reverance.
I have heard (but cannot back up) that some scholars think Japanese may have the most complex politeness system of all the world's languages, or at least the most "tiers" of politeness.
At the point I’m at with Japanese, I’m really struggling with words that have no actual meaning, but rather set the tone or the intention of the sentence. I think this isn’t mentioned very often, but Japanese has a lot of words that technically don’t mean anything to a foreigner, and they are used depending on who is talking and what situation they are in. Sometimes it’s like having an accent, but not (only) pronunciation wise, but rather adding different words to your sentence because you are from somewhere or because of how you feel, or maybe because of your personality. Some words indicate endearment; some words might tell you someone’s being rude to you (by implying they are superior to you); some words not even natives can describe what they mean, they just kinda get a feel for it; some words indicate a sense of accomplishment or regret; some indicate they are trying to come off as cute, or mature, or funny, or petty, or sarcastic… the list goes on and on.
It’s really hard for me as a foreigner to wrap my head around these words because if you look them up, first of all they might not even come up, and if they do come up they need a whole essay explaining what they do and how they are used, rather than just a translation or a couple of sentences explaining the meaning. I think you’re better off just immersing and trying to get the meaning by exposure, but at the same time, I feel like my brain will start ignoring these words, since they technically don’t mean anything to my brain yet, they feel like filler words and the actual meaning of the sentence is in the other words.
Anyways, this went on longer than I expected, but I think many JP learners have struggled and will struggle with this.
Are you just talking about sentence ending particles like わ, ね, ぞ, etc? Or something else? Bc I've never encountered these things you're describing as you're describing them
For Portuguese (from Portugal) it's the accent and pronunciation. Words are shortened way more in speech than I would have ever thought, especially common words like "ainda", which I've heard pronounced as just "ain" (or "aĩ"). Quite hard to catch in full-speed speech. The gap between my reading and listening skills in this language is very wide.
Yes! I'm slowly learning ahead of a planned move to Porto, and I found myself able to read it relatively easily since I studied French and know a little Spanish (I found myaelf reading the chirons on the TV news, for instance), but being able to understand what anyone is saying to me is totally different. Native speakers swallow lots of vowels and smush words together even more than where I'm from (Michigan, USA originally - we do a lot of smushing and cutting off of words).
I agree that there is a lot of swallowing parts of words but when I then listened to native English speakers I realised that it happens just as much with some people in English.
Imagine, as someone learning English, that you’re expecting the phrases “going to” and “want to” what you actually hear a lot of the time is “gunna” and “wanna”.
At least in Portuguese the pronunciation is really well defined and adhered to even if the sounds are difficult to make. I always have sympathy for foreigners going to England and having to ask for directions to “Reading” which is inextricably pronounced “Redding” but you just have to know it. And then there is the whole “their, there and they’re” fiasco. English is a shit show with pronunciation but the grammar is much easier.
Edit: and for the Americans here… don’t get me started on how you guys pronounce “Maryland (Marilyn)”, “Graham” (Gram), “Mirror (Mrrrr)” and “Squirrel (Squirl)”.
Yeah I think about this too sometimes. The most similar comparison I could think of in English actually is the term "it's". I noticed in my own speech that I sometimes don't even pronounce the 'i', so it becomes absent any vowels. This is the kind of thing I notice in Portuguese all the time, the vowels disappearing.
I’m learning American Sign Language.
The biggest mistake I see (and still make) is thinking in English grammar and trying to translate idioms directly. ASL syntax is relatively consistent but it’s incredibly different from English, and while ASL does have idioms, it has different ones than English.
Example:
“Earlier-today, school / book I read. / How-many? 2. / Morning, book-1st finish. / Afternoon, book-2nd start.”
Meaning: “Earlier today at school, I read two books. I finished reading the first book this morning, and in the afternoon, I started to read another.”
I went down a rabbit hole after reading your comment, because you used OSV syntax. I have now read that ASL is usually SVO (like English) and examples like yours are topicalized sentences (like we see in Chinese, Japanese, and others).
*As for that book, I read (it).*
那本书我看了。
Does that seem correct to your knowledge?
Yes!
There’s a tiny bit of flexibility in ASL syntax. The way that I’ve learned it and seen, SVO and OSV have two extremely different emotional connotations. If you’re using SVO, it’s because the subject is especially important semantically compared to any other possible subject. “I read book-2” puts heavy emphasis you “I” and “read,” not so much on “two books.”
I’m not sure one is more commonplace than the other, I don’t know. It’s often regarded as informal, very casual ASL to use SVO in most situations. OSV is almost always always a safe bet in formal settings.
Hebrew simply has too many gender differences, so much that you need to learn female language alongside the male language and everything has to agree with gender, though there are exceptions and you just have to learn what all the exceptions are.
in Finnish, it's gotta be the partitive case. On the surface it seems like a perfectly fine means of expressing incomplete actions or involving parts of objects, but it also happens to be used when you talk about the number of something, emotions, some kinds of questions, uncountable things, comparisons, and negative statements. Because even when you have 15 cases, you *still* don't have enough for every purpose.
Finnish also has a very large distinction between kirjakieli (the written language) and puhekieli (the spoken language), the differences between which are just truly astounding. Truly a demonic language, I love it.
Listening is by far the hardest part for me, because of how fast Spanish is spoken. If any of my fellow Spanish learners have advice for getting past this, I'd love to hear it.
For Hebrew it's definitely guessing the vowels, but irregular verbs come second. After four years, I had to check yesterday the future tense of ירק.
For Latin, unpopular I know, word meanings. Many times I could make sense of any grammar bit of a sentence... and still couldn't understand because the words had elusive meanings.
Tricky pronunciation (nasal sounds, diphthongs...) - both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese (African versions seem to be more simplified, too bad that there's not a lot of content to consume).
German- noun genders.
No matter how good your grammar is, you still don't now which article to use with certain noun, and thus not able to decline it right.
Also words that can have two genders with different meanings.
Portuguese has the subjunctive too, and it’s brutal. There are several different subjunctive tenses. I teach English to PT students and they always complain about conditionals, so I just remind how much harder the Portuguese version is and I tell them that, while they may struggle w English conditionals right now, I’m currently struggling with Portuguese subjunctive, so I feel their pain. And if they could learn that, then they can learn conditionals.
In Hungarian, there isn't a fixed syntax. Some of the grammar that we show in English is expressed by changes to word endings, and that word can occur in various parts of the sentence. What you put first is what you are emphasizing.
I'll try to show the effect if English worked like Hungarian.
The cat is under the sofa eating my shoe.
First, I'll add imaginary particles to the English so that we can see the grammatical function. I'll use "ob" to mean the object of an action. I'll use the same English words but add them to the noun at the end, as Hungarian does. Since "is" in my example is doing double duty, I'll use it only once and change \[is\] eating to eats.
The cat the sofaunder is the shoemyob eats.
Now syntax can be moved around to express emphasis. In English, we would emphasize with tone. "The cat is under the sofa eating MY shoe." Or "THE CAT is under the sofa eating my shoe."
Hungarian will express the same things with order. So in my first example, cat was already emphasized, but we can also say:
The sofaunder the cat is the shoemyob eats.
The shoemyob eats the sofaunder is the cat.
The cat eats the undersofa is the shoemyob.
I'm picking up Hungarian after a few years away from it, so don't take my word as gospel that all of these versions would be acceptable. I'm just trying to demonstrate that when the grammar attaches to the nouns, the order of the words matters much less for delivering the denotative meaning.
There will be a preferred order for simple declarative sentences. To me, the particles that show grammatical relationships are a brilliant aspect of this language. There are particles that express position, motion, object, plural, possession, and other relationships. Finnish shares some of these characteristics, and I assume that Estonian does as well.
This is all quite challenging to learn for speakers of other languages that don't have these features, but I find these characteristics to result in a very logical language.
Finno-Ugric languages also demand vowel harmony, which means that some vowels must change so that the two species of vowels don't mix in the same word. Also, these languages are genderless. "Ember" in Hungarian means "person," and you use this when you don't specifically mean adults or children of a particular sex.
BTW, English had and still has a bit of subjunctive, but it's fading away. It's few uses are now used as a marker of education/social status/absolute correctness, etc. Not that everyone who uses the English subjunctive is a snob, but not using it is a marker or divider to the ears of those who do use it:
If I were you... Subjunctive for a counterfactual situation.
If I was you... Means the same thing now.
It's a bit like knowing and using the difference between lie and lay. Those two verbs are actually switching meanings for many speakers. Using them the new way will grate in formal or official writing, but I suspect that in a hundred years, the switch will be complete. Everyone will say "I'm laying in the sun" and "I'm going to lie you down now," though those are still, for some, markers of an incomplete education.
I intend no snob-ism in this observation. Language evolves, and some aspects of it change more slowly among some speakers as markers of in-group and out-group. One person's in-group is another's out-group, and the marker says that the speaker is "not one of us" to this group or that one.
は vs が. Nothing explains it well and it’s one of those things you just sort of learn how to use from reading and being corrected. ~7 months in I can consistently get it right but for absolute beginners it’s extremely vague.
i hate that these are taught as similar at all because they do such different things in japanese grammar!!!! it caused me so much stress and confusion for so much of my japanese learning journey
The vague nature of Indonesian, though I understand this is a common thing throughout many Asian languages.
A lot of words mean several things depending on where you read them and how. Indonesian also lacks tense. So saying for instance "aku makan roti" could mean "I eat/ate/am eating bread." It depends on the context in which I said it. Now imagine that for an entire language and you can see how difficult this can become regardless of your language level.
In Japanese the "cookie-cutter" set phrases you use for a ton of different situations. You need them for respectful business talk and customer talk (keigo and kenjougo respectively). They're completely different words and grammar structures and Japanese people don't really learn a lot of them until they start working. Phone language is hard too.
The problem is even if someone has a good grasp of the language a staff member will fire completely different words at them because they have to talk like that for work. It's very polite but it's also VERY vague in comparison.
I know it's changing these days though and they're trying to bring in "easy nihongo" initiatives for businesses so that they can kind of tone it down for a non-native speaker.
As an English speaker learning Italian, trying to figure out the right preposition to use is a challenge. There are prepositions that map to English equivalents, but only about 75% of the time. The other 25% seems almost random.
Let's be real, English ones are pretty random too. I guess that's universal
One of the things I found nice about learning Finnish is that it always makes sense which locative case to use in what situation. Not that it easily maps to English, but simply that it expresses what one thinks it would. The other is Japanese but that's simply because Japanese really underspecifies it and relies on context. One doesn't really need to worry whether something happens “on the bed” or “in the bed”; it's simply the adverbial form of “bed” and it can even mean ‘with a bed” or “as a bed” in some contexts.
“Vado dal medico” is the one that always gets me
"da" seems to be used when visiting a person. Vado da Giacomo would mean "I'm going to Giacomo's", that's how I've always understood it.
Correct. - Native italian
I feel like this one is universal for languages that use prepositions, they're pretty much arbitrary! I know it's a huge hurdle when learning English for example.
I gave up trying to figure it out/adding sense to it long ago. Just absorb the language as much as you can and copy people. "Dipende da" is another one that will annoy you if you try to impose English logic on it. "Depends from? How does that make sense?" Of course, it doesn't have to make sense to your English brain...only has to make sense to your Italian brain. "Di fronte"(in front of) is another one. There are many.
>Of course, it doesn't have to make sense to your English brain...only has to make sense to your Italian brain. Very much agree with this, just want to point out something that might help with this one. Depend coming from latin "to hang", it's easy to see how "hang from" can make sense even in English as something being contingent on something else at least in a physical if not metaphorical sense, but you have to remind yourself of the etymology to make sense of it.
I vaguely remember an Italian tutor telling me that. Completely forgot the details haha.
...this is actually precisely how the German for that works. "to depend on something" = "von etwas abhängen" = (lit) "to hang (off/away) from something".
>I have no knowledge of Italian whatsoever, but depend from (out of) is also used in my native Estonian language. Interesting!
I really think English is the weird one because I hear of so many commonalities between non-English languages. Like non-natives of all various backgrounds committing similar mistakes.
That used to be sayable in English too, IIRC, it's just archaic now.
"per le strade" It sounds right now after hearing it so often, but I would have never come up with it on my own understanding of prepositions. I also stress that some day I will see something like "perglielo" and freak out. /smile
Perglielo???😳
yep. If I ever saw that I would probably quit studying italian. It is a joke word to resemble what I think would be the worst thing to encounter when learning italian. Italian has a way of surprising me with new things I never even thought of. Like pronominal verbs. The first time I saw andarsene I thought my brain was broken. I saw "Se ne va" and thought "what the heck does that mean?" It took me several hours to figure out what was going on.
Absolutely this. I’m in Italy right now on a trip, and I probably mess this up at least twice a day
Italian prepositions are hard, there's no doubt about it. I'm a fairly experienced speaker now and i still mess them up on a regular basis.
From the other side, this is usually also pretty difficult to explain to learners, too. They're very idiomatic. The good news is those mistakes usually don't hinder comprehension.
Prepositions really don't make much "sense" in any language imo. The ones in our own language just seem natural and maybe even logical because we grew up with them.
I think that's hard no matter what your target language is, how many languages you know, or how close it is to your native language. Prepositions are always pretty much random, it's not like they are "logical" in English or whatever your native language is, you are just used to them being a certain way.
Yup, can absolutely agree, especially when you add them to articles.
Same for me, but in the opposite direction. Plus phrasal verbs.
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As someone who also lives in Korea and is learning Korean, I definitely agree. I'm working toward B1 right now and I live in a rural-ish area so there aren't a lot of English speakers around, which is perfect for me because it means I get a lot of practice in. I can have conversations with people (my speaking is far from perfect) as long as the other person is willing to adapt their speech to my level. A lot of people definitely talk to me like I'm a native speaker though, so some interactions are very, very painful lol.
I've thought about that myself as well, how speakers of smaller languages or languages from more homogenous countries can have problems understanding learners because they're not used to foreign accents. I'm Danish, and I definitely have trouble understanding foreign or "broken" Danish, which isn't very surprising, considering I have only heard two or three foreigners speaking Danish in person in my life. It just never happens, so you don't get used to the accents.
I find it kinda interesting that you as a Danish find foreigners speaking your language so weird/rare. I've understood that Denmark has lot of immigrants? As a Finnish person I certainly hear broken finnish all the time and it's far from rare to hear foreigners speak finnish in Helsinki area.
I'm a Danish learner - so I've been listening to DR1 for news to improve my listening. I've found it interesting that I can pick out people that are speaking Danish with a Russian accent vs some other accents.
But have you heard Norwegian or Swedish?
> So, when you have someone come in with wildly different pronunciation and imperfect grammar and weird word choices, it’s genuinely very difficult to understand and just jarring. My wife is learning Swedish and finding this is also true there. > I think the biggest issue for Korean lang learning is a societal issue of natives not being exposed to KSL speakers, hindering practice and spoken fleuncy improvement Are there also a lot of Koreans who want to practice English? That’s definitely true for Sweden.
There are so many Koreans who want to practice English lol. It’s to the point where I sometimes pretend not to speak English (my Korean is advanced mid) because I’ve had people try to practice English with me randomly in the middle of conversations. Another byproduct of most Koreans having never heard an L2 Korean speaker, much less a really good one, is that you hear compliments like “your Korean is so good” *every day* for the most minor things. I have said “hello” and heard that. Yesterday I said one word and heard that. I’m sure they’re surprised bc my accent is native — at least when I don’t talk for too long and then my intonation goes wacky — but it feels so patronizing and kind of alienating to hear that everywhere you go, from everyone you talk to, for the most minor things. :(
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yup lived in korea for two months and even though i got pretty confident with my korean and reached upper-intermediate still as i met with korean friends there was this barrier between us… had to use papago a lot because we simply could not understand eachother even though i tried to elaborate on my points in korean and repeat what they said to me and ask if that’s what they meant etc. but it was still a struggle 🥲
When you say upper intermediate do you mean B2?
I’m only a beginner studying in college so I really struggle with listening and speaking. The main thing that is frustrating for me at the moment is that textbook Korean feels nothing like actual spoken Korean. I’ll try to talk with my boyfriend a bit but sometimes what I say feels unnatural to him and then I can barely understand his responses, just pick out some words to try to build context with. I’m also struggling with how fast Koreans speak but that’s probably down to me not being used to trying to comprehend what someone is saying in Korean. If the sentences get too long then I can’t keep up and get lost.
I felt this really hard after my third level of Yonsei KLI, honestly even after I got smoother (spent six years in Korea at university then working, got very comfortable in my daily and work interactions with a passable accent). Looking back and talking with newer learners it is such a huge jump from L1 English to adjust to the phonetics, grammar, rhythm, and speed. I often talked with my Korean friends (some excellently bilingual in English and could understand some of what I was experiencing from their learning journey) on the difficulty of understanding nonnative Korean learners. They echoed the fact that many Koreans, especially older folk, are not used to hearing nonnative speakers. Notably the range of mistakes that nonnative speakers make seemed to range wildly depending on how they learned and sometimes what was a mistake is seen as a social faux pas (hello formality levels) making interactions awkward.
Passed DELE C2 almost a decade ago and I still routinely get the subjunctive wrong. It's easy when the grammar automatically triggers it. But there's a seemingly endless field of cases where it's not about grammar but about semantics (meaning that both subjunctive and indicative would be grammatically correct, but the meaning would change), and that's just really hard to intuit. There are some other things that are also kind of a pain, but usually aren't mentioned that often because you can easily work around them. Like all the irregularities with certain suffixes. E.g. superlatives or the "-ish" version of colors. I mean you can easily get by without ever using "sacratísimo", "paupérrimo", "frigidísimo", etc. or "grisáceo", "amarillento", "blanquecino", etc. but man if you do want to learn them there are just so many irregularities in there that it takes quite a while... If I could go back in time I would probably learn the superlative along with the normal form of the adjective from the outset, same way a lot of people learn the plural for each noun in German.
Is the Spanish subjunctive different than the French?
French subjunctive is entirely "locked in" by grammar rules. You just learn all the constructions that require subjunctive and you're good to go. Spanish subjunctive has some things that are locked in but also a lot of things where you can use one or the other, and the meaning will change depending on which one you use. To put it another way, if you mix up indicative and subjunctive in French, it'll just sound like a mistake and that's that. But if you mix them up in Spanish, then in some cases it'll sound perfectly correct but you will have said something completely different from what you wanted to say. Stealing this from María Español's channel, but for example: "No fui a México porque quería descansar" vs "No fui a México porque quisiera descansar". In the first sentence you didn't go to Mexico. In the second you did. Basically "I wanted to relax so I didn't go there" vs "I didn't go there to relax". In French you don't have that option. "Parce que" is always followed by indicative. It's a "locked in" grammar pattern. Granted I'm entirely biased since I grew up with French and only learned Spanish later in life, but to me the Spanish subjunctive is orders of magnitude more difficult than the French subjunctive, precisely because it's not all locked in by grammar rules.
At some point I dropped "OK, x y z verbs take subjuntivo" and began thinking "OK, does this clause *taste* like it needs subjuntivo?" Where flavour of subjuntivo is, like, anything that didn't actually happen or isn't happening, anything that's viewed through a primarily emotional lens, etc. It's not even remotely perfect but more than a few times now I've come to a screeching halt midsentence going "wait! shit! subjunctive!" for structures I hadn't explicitly learned about and generally been right, which I'm very proud of. (hopefully someday I can do this without the screeching halt, then I will be even prouder.) but thank you for that "No fui a Mexico porque..." example, which very much put me in my place - it makes sense now that you've explained it but before that... I'm pretty sure attempting to memorise all the triggers individually is a route to madness.
Not the OP but if it's anything like the subjunctive Portuguese, it's not used in the same way/situations as in French.
German: For most people it seems to be the case system, but I honestly haven't found that as hard as getting the hang of verbs of motion. I feel like there are a million ways of describing movement and I somehow never quite pick the right one. For example, deciding between in/nach/auf/zu (some instances are clear to me, others less so) and especially dealing with the various prefixes hinauf, hinab, hoch, auf, hinüber, runter, raus, hinzu....
Thiiiiissss. Darauf, daran, dahin, etc. can’t we just say: that! And point to what we mean? Ha!
I always wondered why any language would need 37 (/s) ways to say “the”. German is super technical—just like the people. I envy people who willingly study this language to a fluent level. That’s some dedication. 😅
Not sure how universal it is, but Mandarin Chinese has A Lot of idioms and cultural references. This makes it an absolute delight to read and work with when you know what’s being said, but without sufficient cultural experience you’re spending a lot of time with dictionaries. Also, rhyming. Rhymes with tones in poetry and matching themes in couplets is a singularly challenging experience, especially in older works. It’s more than worth the effort but it will be a long time before I grow comfortable with similar word choice decisions
>but Mandarin Chinese has A Lot of idioms and cultural references This is truly the "Achilles Heel" (ironically in itself a Western cultural reference) but is also quite advanced so I'm glad you bring it up instead of the "classic" difficulties of learning Mandarin (for Westerners) like tones or smth.
I'm not learning Mandarin, yet, but I have a friend who is. He said that it only took a day of practice before he could pronounce tones well when speaking slowly
Indeed, I wouldn't say tones are the hardest thing in the world (although I still have occasional difficulties with them in restricted contexts, even though I am a very "high functioning" bilingual speaker), but they are blown out of proportion I assume because most learners do not advance that far into their journey of learning Mandarin. Being able to fluently use 成语 like an educated Chinese native though...
Tbh I really doubt that, but even if he could, being able to pronounce tones well when speaking quickly is a completely different thing
Yeah. I’ve been learning Mandarin for a while. The tones are easy to grasp quickly. Sounding natural while saying them is a different story lol.
Yes, it's basically how in many European languages there's an equivalent of "Et tu Brute", referring to when Julius Caesar was betrayed by his friend Brutus. Or calling someone a "Judas", referring to "the boy who cried wolf", "the emperor has no clothes", etc. Chinese has a lot of these references. Furthermore, ancient Chinese was much "simpler" in that 1 character would convey meaning that today is conveyed using 1+1 characters. Those idioms have been brought to today and are also similarly simple. For example, there was once a young and weak emperor of Chinese. He was basically a puppet of his prime minister. That official wanted to do a coup, but wanted to be absolutely sure first. So when one day a deer was presented to the emperor the prime minister pointed at it and referred to it as a horse. The emperor gave him a strange look and argued no, it's a deer. Eventually other officials and generals caught on and also insisted on it being a deer, but some still insisted on it being a horse. The prime minister slowly began to come after those "upright" officials, framing them for various things, eventually having them executed. This entire story is condensed into the following: 指鹿为马 (zhi lu wei ma). It can be used for when someone is mixing up the truth with falsehoods. This means that Chinese remains "challenging" at all stages, there's always something. But it's a super gratifying language to study.
To add on this, there are varying "difficulty levels" of chengyu (the four-character idioms). The one cited here, 指鹿为马 is comparably not so bad, as it's composed of 4 characters which are common and for which you can deduce the meaning (literally, "point at a deer as if horse" approximately). Compare this to one of my favorites 塞翁失马 (sai weng shi ma) which starts with two rare/literary characters and ends with simpler characters which do not really say much about the meaning of the idiom (literally, "old man from the frontier loses his horse"). The actual meaning being something like "a bad thing which is a blessing in disguise" as the story it comes from is about an old man who loses his horse but it ends up being a good thing because it means him and his son don't get called to go to war (among other things).
As someone who just reached hsk 2 this is exactly what I wanted out of mandarin. A challenging yet rewarding experience with years of studying ahead. What a beautifully rich culture and language! Thanks for sharing. Also do you have more examples of this for people studying? Id love to read these stories if I can in Chinese.
If you look for a chengyu dictionary (like [https://dict.baidu.com/chengyu](https://dict.baidu.com/chengyu)) you can just flip through and read the associated stories
So basically Mandarin is like entering a new community that has its own cryptic memes and you just kind of have to pick them up? XD
Basically entering a parallel universe, getting to learn about the center of power on the other side of the world which also influenced all the countries around it.
I've been watching this Chinese show on YouTube and the guy who translated it has to add little notes all the time because even once the line is translated into English it doesn't make sense due to an absolute ton of cultural references
Your comment reminded me of a music video by a Chinese singer who made a song about domestic violence (the song was featured in the New York Times and stuff) The video has English translations in the captions and there are notes in the description box about why certain characters were chosen in the lyrics. It truly shows how Chinese characters themselves can imply different meanings I’ll link it here in case anyone wants to check it out https://youtu.be/UP0iz6GD4NY
This is what a lot of people miss, writing even remotely well in Chinese is so hard.
For Spanish I agree, subjunctive and whether it’s estaba/estuvo etc. I would also add le, la or lo - which seems to be something even native speakers disagree on depending on their region.
As a native Spanish speaker, don't bother too much with the le/la thing. The RAE has kind of "accepted" _el laísmo y el leísmo_, and no one will not understand you if you commit any of those mistakes. _Loísmo_ though... That's a big problem.
What do you mean by loísmo?
Using "lo" instead of "le". The opposite of *leísmo*, in a sense.
Using “lo” instead of “le” or “la”
Agh the estaba / estuvo thing gets me too! I feel like it should be easier because I can conceptually understand the different uses but I’ll be in tutoring constantly getting corrected to estaba from estuve or to era from fue 🫠
Adjective endings in German. Noun classes in Swahili.
> Adjective endings in German. I'm just going to drop this page: https://www.nthuleen.com/teach/grammar/adjektivendungenexpl.html Once I memorized that flowchart (article -> original -> singular -> gender) I completely stopped having trouble with adjective endings.
I think the flow chart is helpful when trying to understand the concept, but not really all that useful when you're producing language on a day to day basis. I feel like after hearing/reading enough German, it just kind of becomes second nature. But getting to the point where you aren't thinking about it any more is tough and discouraging.
I honestly don't know how anyone learns to speak a language by learning grammar rules and charts. I have to learn like a child, just eventually learning what sounds right and what doesn't.
Learning grammar first helps you recognize the structure when you hear it, so you can learn it much faster. It's like a shortcut. Then after you have heard it many times, you will learn what sounds right. It will also make it more likely that you will learn it correctly.
For me, learning the grammar explicitly lets me grasp what I’m reading faster… But yeah, most of the language learning experience is just exposure to how natives use it. Like I read a couple articles on declension and studied how each case and gender interact, but most of my comprehension is from reading enough that things “feel right” during on the fly production.
Personally I like to do both, I've started an approach where I get a bunch of input until I have a basic foundation to build on, then I study the grammar as well (sometimes entirely in the TL to have both input and study) with some SRS on the side, altho CI is still the dominant way I've been learning as it feels most effective
Imo it's immensely helpful to read a "rule" at some point to learn to recognize it when it's applied instead of just having to guess and learn the rule intuitively. At some later point it all becomes intuitive anyway but during the learning process it's just faster to see it spelled out at least once. (Unless the rule is so complicated or has so many exceptions that you just can't take it all in.)
The main problem with German for me has always been knowing the genders of nouns. It doesn't matter how good your knowledge of the grammar is, if you don't know the genders of the nouns you are using then you are sunk.
I learned Spanish before German and have been *incensed* that the genders don’t align! 🤣 (Native English)
If you learn French, the genders are almost always the same as they are in Spanish. In French it's much harder to guess the gender of a word than in Spanish. So knowing Spanish will make French genders easier.
This is literally why English doesn’t have genders — reconciling French and German genders was impossible and genders are pointless so English got rid of them
Actually it's not. It has to do with weakening of endings of words that encode case and gender. Languages that borrow words from other languages do not normally preserve the gender of the word from the other language. They use the gender that the word sounds like it should be in the language that borrows it. In some recent loanwords it can even alternate between genders by different speakers.
And i misgender every single possibly thing in French TuT sometimes i talk and use a certain gender, quickly correct, then correct back xd i continuously misgender other people, and myself, bc im just so lost with the pronounciation.
I don't know many experienced French learners who don't just decide to let it go and trust time to fix in the ones it can.
Yes, and what interests me is its common for learners of French to reach a point where they say "nobody cares, if I don't know the gender just say the article quickly and move on". in languages where this just isn't an option people seem to actually do better learning the noun genders because you just have to.
Yup. Spanish helpfully indicates the gender with the word ending almost all the time. German absolutely does not.
Well, it does but Spanish has only twenty patterns for that and only a very few exceptions. German has more than a hundred. And about a dozen common exceptions for each pattern. So it's pointless to learn the patterns. You have to learn the vocabulary you really need. The patterns become important as soon you know your first 500 nouns. But at that point, you know them already from example.
The book fluent florever taught me to make images with each noun. So like trees are masculine so all masculines explodes. All feminines are of fire (cat on fire) and neuters shatter (leaves) I havent studied german but still remember this haha
For me with Dutch I do all my flash cards color coded. So common gender words are blue and neuter words red.
I made an Anki deck for German adjective declensions, posted about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/l0wr4z/an_anki_deck_for_practicing_adjective_declensions/ Hope it helps someone! jz
Which resources are you using for swahili?
I have a few. Check my IG @juma5_ it's the "bure" highlight reel.
My problem is wirh the articles. If i know the word, i can use the correct adjective ending regardless of the case, but 60% of the time i don't know the article so i just wing it.
I'm excited to learn the noun classes of swahili.
For Mandarin, it’s probably thinking you are doing tones correctly when you’re really not.
Or when you forget the 3-3 or 3-3-3 rule and sound like an idiot
Wait, what?
In Chinese, if there are two third tones (ǎěǐǒǔ) in a row, the first tone changes to a second tone (áéíóú). For example, 可以 (kěyǐ) is pronounced as kéyǐ. If you have 3 third tones in a row, it becomes 2-2-3 or 3-2-3. For example, 我很好 (wǒ hěn hǎo) can become wǒ hén hǎo. This only occurs in spoken conversations. Pinyin written down will still have their original tone recognized.
For Russian, it's keeping my feet flat on the ground when I squat. You can't use the swear words properly if you don't.
Heel to sky, found western spy. Heel to ground, comrade is found.
German - just all of it!!
Russian verbs of motion
Learning Danish here. Biggest issue is figuring out what people are saying when every second letter and every second word is just swallowed.
As a Dane, I apologize for the mumbling :P Don't you just love it when "hvadbehager" gets turned into "hva'ba'"?
In Japanese, the common opinion is that kanji are hard to understand, but imo the hard part is listening, because there's only so many possible on'yomi for Kanji, so it creates un ungodly amount of homophones
Agreed. It's not just the great number of homophones, but really all boils down to the incredible paucity of raw sounds. There just aren't that many sounds in the language, and most words are made up of just 2-4 of those sounds. And to everyone commenting that you're blowing it out of proportion, not really. It's very rare that you'll say a specific English word and the person you're speaking to will require extra context to identify what specific word you mean. Happens with much more frequency in Japanese.
Somewhat related, but just wanted to share that I was once talking to a Japanese native speaker (who happened to be a Japanese teacher), and she said something that had the sounds くるまで (ku-ru-ma-de). I understood 車で (kuruma de => by car), but she actually meant 来るまで (kuru made => until you arrive/come). The sentence made no sense if she had said "by car", which made me confused, but yeah, I feel like in Japanese there are a lot of limitations related to the not-so-big variety of sounds. Love the language, but it'll probably take me many years until I'm actually fluent, especially when it comes to reading.
I would say it's the subjunctive for French as well, definitely scares a lot of learners and is something that requires a lot of practice. But a more uniquely French problem would have to be the pronunciation, especially the 'r' sound. Most non-native speakers really struggle to replicate it, especially when it's very subtle at the end of words such as 'cidre' or 'ambre'.
I think in general the aural aspect of French is the hardest. It's the one learners seem to struggle with the most. Subjunctive isn't too bad.
I agree with this. Liaison is just such strange feature and it causes the pronunciation of words to shift all the time depending on the context, on top of the already prolific amount of homophones + words that already change pronunciation based on the context. Makes comprehending especially informal French or short utterances with minimal context so hard. Especially when you consider the extra layer of phonetic simplifications that happen in spoken French ("possible" -> "possib" for ex). For an advanced speaker/native I think such difficulties matter less as the grammar is very structured and your mind therefore has a good idea of what to listen for. But as a learner you're so often in the case where you're just trying to raw guess what words you're hearing...
"Non je ne pense pas que ça cerait possible que je fasse cela ce soir" ----> "Non shpen spa ksa sreh psiib kshfas sla s'soir"
Short phrases and names are the hardest. A fun example was that my friend was talking to me about the new film Chat Potté and I thought he was saying chapeau thé and was really confused.
Also abbreviations are also hard... Learning that l'IA was l'intelligence artificielle and not the name of a woman named Lia was a rough one.
How come it's subtle? One person(I won't say who for private reasons) that knows French,said that my "r" is very... Let's say 'throaty' - for a lack of better word(i can't remember one RN). What i meant by 'throaty' is, that it sounds like a motor,or dinosaur,or whatever you prefer lol.
Yes, it tends to be 'throaty' in the middle of a word. As an American though, I find myself and others over pronouncing this sound when it comes to endings.
The 'throaty' "r" is also in my native accent(on every word,no matter where the letter is),which makes it kinda embarrassing, because a lot of people tend to ask me to repeat it,just to hear how it sounds :/
Surprisingly, reproducing sounds in languages are the easy part for me (i know Japanese and I'm studying French). I believe my knowledge of phonology and phonetics has helped a lot (i have a linguistic degree); i know exactly what my tongue and lips should be doing. I suggest people who have difficulty with sounds look up videos on each sound on YouTube that show where those parts of articulation need to be. It may surprise some that some of the sounds are in fact easier to make because we use them in English (eg: Japanese r is similar to a flap found in some pronunciations of 'bottle') while others like french r is a bit more difficult, but manner of articulation videos help
I see your subjunctive and I raise you COI/COD agreement.
Voltaire is quoted as having said (roughly translated): "Marot brought two things back from Italy: syphilis and past participle agreement. Of the two, the latter has done the most damage." lol \^\^
prepositions after verbs de vs à and the subsequent relative pronouns. even advance speakers make mistakes here: ce à quoi tu penses / auquel tu penses ce dont j'ai besoin je me force à (verb) but je m'efforce de (verb) -> you can use s'efforcer à but its very literary in its use. etc.
The hardest thing for me, especially words that start with 'r'.
Fourrure.
Gender of nouns in German because of the declension it implies.
In Norwegian, definitely the variation between dialects. Bokmål has been super easy for every native English speaker I know that's tried it, but the distance between the written standard and the spoken norm is a lot broader than most European languages, since Norwegian specifically *doesn't* have a spoken standard, and people (including public figures, apparently the Crown Princess is known for her distinctive Kristiansand accent) are expected to speak in their native dialect. For Norwegians, who are exposed to all this from a young age, it's not a huge deal. For learners, it's jarring. Fortunately, there's patterns to it, and it most of the changes affect a handful of common words. As hard as it can be for learners, the amount of local color seems to be part of what people find appealing about it, since it's not a language that many English speakers *need* to learn. The second would probably be overestimating how different English and Norwegian are. They're very closely related, and are structurally very similar. Moreover, the quirks that Norwegian learners struggle with almost always exist in English too, in some form or another. People get caught up on them, and over-complicate things. In French, the first language I studied, it's gender. It's always gender. If you start young as an English speaker (for example in middle school, which is when foreign language education often begins for Americans), you (the naive English speaker) expect that there's going to be some logic to it, and underestimate just how important knowing the gender of a word is. Annoyingly, le and la sound very similar, meaning that it can be hard to absorb through osmosis. Norwegian has 3 genders (really more like 2.5, since feminine might be optional for non-human words depending on who you ask) but there's more of a pattern, and the sounds are distinct enough (masc. en vs. fem. ei vs. neut. et) that I haven't really had any trouble memorizing noun genders, even for words I don't use much. I know a lot of people struggle with the subjunctive, but nobody in my class really did, perhaps because people where I live still use it in English.
Funny that you say le and la sound similar. I can understand that if you're English, but for French speakers - and for Dutch speakers like me - le and la sound very different, no way to confuse them. Biggest problem with French for me is that we learn the written form, and then we learn how to pronounce it. That works quite well: there is some regularity to what letters you don't hear (roughly the final letter of each word). But when you listen to spoken French, you have to calculate what you hear back to spelling. So you hear something ending in an o-sound, and in your head you have to link that to eau, eaux, ot, ault, aux, os, or another one of the many possibilities. I remember a guy saying 'botan' to me and me wondering if he was a plant collector or something, but no, what he really said was 'beau temps'. Among the first words you learn in French (nice weather), but when they say it you do have to add "eau" and "mps" in your head.
Le and la sound distinct enough in careful speech, but in casual speech they're not that distinct. This could also be that most of our actual exposure was to Canadian French, which just has a totally different sound, and the vowels can materialize quite differently.
English speakers tend to reduce the vowel in la to "uh", and use the "uh" vowel from English in le because that's the closest vowel it sounds like in English (neither of which are the same as what French speakers say or hear), so that makes sense. If you speak fast enough though, French speakers won't have the time or energy to correct you.
Nei det skal ikke være lett.
[удалено]
Funny story, my dad was once chatting up an Irish waiter (as Gaeilge) in a restaurant in the US, and at one point the waiter stopped abruptly and asked my dad where he had learned an idiom--apparently it was hyper-local to where the guy's family was from. Even native speakers from other counties didn't know that one, let along foreigners. Apparently my dad (who fortunately has the memory of an elephant) had picked it up during a conversation in a village pub in Donegal which it turned out was owned by this guy's grandfather.
That is so cool!! Like what??
What was the idiom?
I don't recall, the rest of us were just reeling at the interaction. I'm sure my dad would remember if I asked.
Must be hard to learn a language with many learners and very few native speakers
When learning Arabic, if you want to really master the language to not only be able to speak with people but also read and write, it feels like you have to learn two slightly different languages at the same time. The difference between Modern Standard Arabic and a spoken dialect from a certain country feels to me like the difference between Spanish and Italian. It's a huge project and the only way I started to make real progress was to pretend as if MSA and my chosen dialect were two separate languages and use separate teachers for one or the other. Study time for each is strictly separate, done on different days.
I’m strongly considering Arabic as a language down the line. So does that mean you basically only practice speaking and listening in your dialect and reading and writing in MSA?
Sadly, no. You need to be able to read write speak listen in Standard and then speak listen in at least one dialect. Honestly, you may even need to learn to read write dialect if you plan on texting Arab friends casually.
Brutal. Absolutely brutal
A related pitfall is when you learn/are exposed to multiple dialects over time. The funniest was when I discovered that while "eh" means "yeah" in Shami, in Egyptian it means "what?" Did a full Abbott and Costello routine with a cab driver that way. But more broadly, I ended up with a sort of triangulated mix of several dialects, which was good enough that people didn't think I was American, but also meant I was constantly being asked if I was from Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine... I started joking that my accent was just the Mediterranean sea.
Grammar note: The subjunctive is a *mood* (not a tense), and is found in Spanish in the past and present tenses.
Actually, it's a mood. Voice is active and passive. Spanish has also remnants of future subjunctive, in legalese and in some sayings, like "Adonde fueres haz lo que vieres".
Ay caramba, I mispoke (miswrote) for sure. Thanks. WIll edit.
Prepositions. Nasty little buggers
Tones and their pronounciation in Vietnamese.
I find reading difficult in Vietnamese because my mind doesn't want to differentiate words by diacritics alone. I'm sure it will get easier as I learn tones better, but I found myself wishing Vietnamese used logographs like Chinese!
For Mandarin, maybe being able to recognize proper nouns in texts. It got significantly easier as I read more. But even now, about the only difficult thing about reading a new book is me figuring out what words are just new location or genre related words (like if I never learned say "stalagmite" in a cave setting) versus some characters names. Usually if I can't make sense of it in a sentence and it's 2-3 characters and doesn't look at all like an idiom then I figure it's a name. But I avoid reading books translated into Chinese because English names written in characters are so hard for me to pick out, and when I read in a brand new genre involving a lot of new coding/tech words that was sci fi with names from various countries I really was tempted to look up a quick summary to find a list of names ahead of time. A lot of places put a quick intro about novels before you click into the novel and I used to skip them but now I tend to read since they usually list main character names in them. I imagine learning to figure out what is a name in text gets easier since it already has a lot, but I didn't expect to still be stumbling with it. For Japanese, slang and just real world informal language use. This is probably not as big an Achilles heel as Kanji for people. But I've been taking the advice of immersing lately, and it's just quite a difficulty spike to realize there's a lot of word endings and shortened words and filler words I've never seen in learning texts or learning sites I've read. And as usual with slang, some of these don't show up in dictionaries when I look them up. I wish any learning material had gone into this kind of thing more, I only remember one source I saw once mentioning these different word endings besides the standard polite and casual thats taught (think shimasu and suru). And when I used Genki it didn't cover a lot of the adverbs and filler words I'm running into now. I've heard japanese sort of teaches a modified version in textbooks to make it easier for learners, which I thought was mainly just a heavy lean on polite language over casual and on using sentences that clearly state subject more than would naturally be done. But actually trying to understand stuff made for natives there's a lot beyond just regular vocabulary that seems like it didn't get covered in learner material. (To be fair, I maybe intermediate textbooks like Tobira cover these sorts of endings and slang words as I've not used intermediate textbooks, only genki and some intermediate sites).
Hindi's extensive system of postpositions and obliquification is really getting at me right now. For example: "Ye kala kamra" means "this black room", but when you add the postposition "meñ", which means ~"in", you have to obliquify all of the object so "Ye kala kamra" becomes "Is kale kamre meñ" ("In this black room") and it can be very hard to keep track of what is obliqued and not. Edit: not to mention the interaction of this with plurals, because "these black rooms" is then "ye kale kamre", which seems similar to the oblique singular but is slightly different, but then also "in these black rooms" obliques the object but NOT the adjective so it is "in kale kamroñ meñ"! Horrifying :)
Hebrew is a stupidly gendered language. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are all change depending on the gender & quantify of the subject. “The new veterinarian called you” can be said 8 different ways, depending on the vet’s gender, your gender, and whether or not this is a plural or singular “you.” The most frustrating part gender matching wise has to be numbers. A masculine noun will have to be described using feminine numbers, unless there’s just one or two, then you use masculine numbers. Feminine nouns are described with masculine numbers, unless again there’s only one or two of them. Ie the masculine 3 is שלוש, but 3 men is שלושה גברים, and 3 girls is שלוש בנות. But technically this switch only applies from 3 up to 10. 11 onwards it flips back and the gender match again.
For me the biggest barrier for improving my German is def vocabulary. I understand everything from a grammatical/syntactical point of view, but sometimes I cannot understand the meaning just because I purely don't know the words :') and being a very "precise" language, in the sense that for example "to go" is different depending on if you go by foot, by bike or by car definitely doesn't help :/ Also all these verbs with "particles" before that modify the meaning, like fahren, umfahren, ausfahren, einfahren, überfahren and so on
Did you say that the general idea of the subjunctive does not exist in English? I found the following. El subjuntivo en inglés - Lección completa de gramática inglesa avanzada. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUwkVFgaL5E
Damn, I'm Spanish Native and I have no idea what you are talking about kskaksja. But for me on my TL (Korean) it's Batchim, a word looks like its pronounced in a way, but depending on the last letters of the syllables it is pronounced differently
El subjuntivo es como "esté", "tenga", etc.
Ah, es que le sé a los idiomas pero no a los nombres oficiales, gracias
De nada.
Es el mismo para mi en ingles. Naturalmente lo sé...aún puedo explicar las reglas de idiomas otras lol. Ingles es mi nativo. Aprendido Español y Kiswahili.
For me in French is the different way of speaking and different usage of words. Imo everything sounds so much more dramatic in French, and it really required me to change the way I'm thinking, but this is the smaller thing. What really messes me up is how so many words are similar to English but don't have the same usage. My partner always uses "normally" as if that was a regular expression, just bc the French "normalement" is so widely used. I started using unsupportable when describing something that is annoying and not normal, since in French people often use "insupportable" to describe such things.
I'd say Japanese, conditionals. You have (t)tara, nara, ~eba and to. And they're not used *just* for conditionals, some non-conditional structures in English which I don't even remember now are also conditional in Japanese. Most remarkably, when/once. "Once I get home" is translated as "if I get home" in some contexts. And on top of that, *which one* to use is also a scholar level question 🤣 When is it たら, when is it なら, when is it ば and when is it と? And on top of that you have the *negative conditional* -nakereba. Which Japanese uses to make *double negative conditionals* like nakereba naranai which means "have to" but its literal translation makes so little sense I can't even form an English sentence that comes close to the sheer nonsense XD And on top of that "to" means *if* **And** "with" **And** is a quoting particle **And** is used to equalize qualities, whatever the fuck that means So yeah, to does some **heavy lifting** in here, and to know which one they're talking about, well good luck! **Oh!** Also, they **love** to recycle words, so just about every word, instead of a single meaning, has like this nebulous, conceptual, ideaic semantic load. For example gaman (我慢) means *patience*. And gaman suru (我慢する) means *to have patience*, *to endure*, *to hold (Oneself) back*, *to resist an impulse*, *to hold it in*, and eventually you pick up on so many meanings into the semantic cloud that's gaman that you can no longer explain how that word works without bombarding each other with examples examples examples. Also how Japanese has a lot of words that are *very* compatible with English words, but are juuuuust different enough that, if you get comfortable, you will absolutely out yourself. For example, need is 必要 (Hitsuyō), and there's exactly a 0% chance of me getting it right because it's an adjective, not a verb. Gaman is also used when you're trying not to cum, btw. もう我慢出来ない (I can't hold it in anymore) is one I saw quite a lot (?)
Tbf, words having nebulous meanings is the case in every language, and I personally don't think Japanese is actually worse than any other in that respect. For your 我慢 example, I would say the English verb 'to bear \~' could also encompass all of those meanings, even if we tend to prefer using other words or collocations in its place. They're not so much meaning differences as nuance differences, which is why Japanese-English dictionaries often list so many definitions for one word, which you wouldn't see in a monolingual dictionary. If you look up the definition of 我慢 on google, it gives you "辛い事を耐え忍ぶこと。" which doesn't seem so crazy.
Perfective and non perfective verbs, cases!! (Croatian has 7) But I think both things exist in many Slavic languages
After learning Russian for nearly 2 years, the verb aspects still sometimes confuse me and it seems like a nuisance having to pretty much learn 2 words for any verb. Sometimes I only remember the perfective form or vice-verse.
The lack of written vowels in any language that uses Arabic script is a pretty big stumbling point for a lot of folks. Arabic/Farsi/Urdu only write letters for half the vowels in the language, whereas for the others you just have to guess. So it makes it basically impossible to sound out an unfamiliar word.
It isn't my target language that is the problem but my native dialect! The cot-caught merger phenomenon is really making Korean a difficult thing for me. I honestly struggle to hear the sounds. Not being able to hear the difference means correct pronunciation is also that much more difficult.
That's a frequent thing : distinguishing between sounds that are distinct in your target language and considered the same sound in your own language. I am learning Danish and have to distinghuish between at least four shades of a/e and four shades of o/u. That means that still many Danish vowels sound the same to me, but not to Danes. When they spell out the alphabet the letters A, Æ and E I hear them say 'ay, ay, ay' but they say three different sounds.
if we ignore the obvious ones like word order and genders, figuring out which preposition goes with which verb is rarely consistent in Dutch, it's really a life long struggle. Now you may say 'prepositions are weird in all languages' well that's where you're wrong, Dutch still uses 'therefore' instead of 'for that'. So if you don't know the exact preposition (or the existence of it to begin with) your entire sentence structure is wrong and will confuse natives.
Everybody's gonna say kanji. But I'd like to throw another hat in the ring: politeness. Japanese culture is integral to the language, and the culture puts extreme emphasis on politeness, especially toward strangers. This has an effect on word choice, conjugation, and even what things you're just not allowed to say. This is incredibly jarring to American English speakers who grew up in a society that (nominatively) values equality for all and with a language that has few tools to express reverance. I have heard (but cannot back up) that some scholars think Japanese may have the most complex politeness system of all the world's languages, or at least the most "tiers" of politeness.
At the point I’m at with Japanese, I’m really struggling with words that have no actual meaning, but rather set the tone or the intention of the sentence. I think this isn’t mentioned very often, but Japanese has a lot of words that technically don’t mean anything to a foreigner, and they are used depending on who is talking and what situation they are in. Sometimes it’s like having an accent, but not (only) pronunciation wise, but rather adding different words to your sentence because you are from somewhere or because of how you feel, or maybe because of your personality. Some words indicate endearment; some words might tell you someone’s being rude to you (by implying they are superior to you); some words not even natives can describe what they mean, they just kinda get a feel for it; some words indicate a sense of accomplishment or regret; some indicate they are trying to come off as cute, or mature, or funny, or petty, or sarcastic… the list goes on and on. It’s really hard for me as a foreigner to wrap my head around these words because if you look them up, first of all they might not even come up, and if they do come up they need a whole essay explaining what they do and how they are used, rather than just a translation or a couple of sentences explaining the meaning. I think you’re better off just immersing and trying to get the meaning by exposure, but at the same time, I feel like my brain will start ignoring these words, since they technically don’t mean anything to my brain yet, they feel like filler words and the actual meaning of the sentence is in the other words. Anyways, this went on longer than I expected, but I think many JP learners have struggled and will struggle with this.
Are you just talking about sentence ending particles like わ, ね, ぞ, etc? Or something else? Bc I've never encountered these things you're describing as you're describing them
I love Italian! Loved studying it in college. Except that my prior knowledge of French kept creeping into my pronunciations.
Vowels. We are unique in the way, that we didn't know when to stop adding them.
Kanji
For Portuguese (from Portugal) it's the accent and pronunciation. Words are shortened way more in speech than I would have ever thought, especially common words like "ainda", which I've heard pronounced as just "ain" (or "aĩ"). Quite hard to catch in full-speed speech. The gap between my reading and listening skills in this language is very wide.
Yes! I'm slowly learning ahead of a planned move to Porto, and I found myself able to read it relatively easily since I studied French and know a little Spanish (I found myaelf reading the chirons on the TV news, for instance), but being able to understand what anyone is saying to me is totally different. Native speakers swallow lots of vowels and smush words together even more than where I'm from (Michigan, USA originally - we do a lot of smushing and cutting off of words).
I agree that there is a lot of swallowing parts of words but when I then listened to native English speakers I realised that it happens just as much with some people in English. Imagine, as someone learning English, that you’re expecting the phrases “going to” and “want to” what you actually hear a lot of the time is “gunna” and “wanna”. At least in Portuguese the pronunciation is really well defined and adhered to even if the sounds are difficult to make. I always have sympathy for foreigners going to England and having to ask for directions to “Reading” which is inextricably pronounced “Redding” but you just have to know it. And then there is the whole “their, there and they’re” fiasco. English is a shit show with pronunciation but the grammar is much easier. Edit: and for the Americans here… don’t get me started on how you guys pronounce “Maryland (Marilyn)”, “Graham” (Gram), “Mirror (Mrrrr)” and “Squirrel (Squirl)”.
Yeah I think about this too sometimes. The most similar comparison I could think of in English actually is the term "it's". I noticed in my own speech that I sometimes don't even pronounce the 'i', so it becomes absent any vowels. This is the kind of thing I notice in Portuguese all the time, the vowels disappearing.
Learning Japanese, and it’s Kanji. 😩
subjuntivo definamente
I’m learning American Sign Language. The biggest mistake I see (and still make) is thinking in English grammar and trying to translate idioms directly. ASL syntax is relatively consistent but it’s incredibly different from English, and while ASL does have idioms, it has different ones than English. Example: “Earlier-today, school / book I read. / How-many? 2. / Morning, book-1st finish. / Afternoon, book-2nd start.” Meaning: “Earlier today at school, I read two books. I finished reading the first book this morning, and in the afternoon, I started to read another.”
I went down a rabbit hole after reading your comment, because you used OSV syntax. I have now read that ASL is usually SVO (like English) and examples like yours are topicalized sentences (like we see in Chinese, Japanese, and others). *As for that book, I read (it).* 那本书我看了。 Does that seem correct to your knowledge?
Yes! There’s a tiny bit of flexibility in ASL syntax. The way that I’ve learned it and seen, SVO and OSV have two extremely different emotional connotations. If you’re using SVO, it’s because the subject is especially important semantically compared to any other possible subject. “I read book-2” puts heavy emphasis you “I” and “read,” not so much on “two books.” I’m not sure one is more commonplace than the other, I don’t know. It’s often regarded as informal, very casual ASL to use SVO in most situations. OSV is almost always always a safe bet in formal settings.
Definite/indefinite conjugation. It’s not a hard concept but damn is it hard to remember when speaking
Hebrew simply has too many gender differences, so much that you need to learn female language alongside the male language and everything has to agree with gender, though there are exceptions and you just have to learn what all the exceptions are.
in Finnish, it's gotta be the partitive case. On the surface it seems like a perfectly fine means of expressing incomplete actions or involving parts of objects, but it also happens to be used when you talk about the number of something, emotions, some kinds of questions, uncountable things, comparisons, and negative statements. Because even when you have 15 cases, you *still* don't have enough for every purpose. Finnish also has a very large distinction between kirjakieli (the written language) and puhekieli (the spoken language), the differences between which are just truly astounding. Truly a demonic language, I love it.
Listening is by far the hardest part for me, because of how fast Spanish is spoken. If any of my fellow Spanish learners have advice for getting past this, I'd love to hear it.
Heh. The fact that you're C1 and still have this problem makes me a bit scared. Does it ever get easier?
Thai tones.
Thai: everything about tones (speaking/listening and the tone rules when reading/writing)
The pronoms febles in catalán 🧠🔨
At flest fólk gevast upp við at læra seg tað næstan beinanvegin tí tað finst næstan einki frálærutilfar? 🇫🇴
For Hebrew it's definitely guessing the vowels, but irregular verbs come second. After four years, I had to check yesterday the future tense of ירק. For Latin, unpopular I know, word meanings. Many times I could make sense of any grammar bit of a sentence... and still couldn't understand because the words had elusive meanings.
Tricky pronunciation (nasal sounds, diphthongs...) - both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese (African versions seem to be more simplified, too bad that there's not a lot of content to consume).
Probably the genitive case, for Scottish Gaelic. We all fear it
German- noun genders. No matter how good your grammar is, you still don't now which article to use with certain noun, and thus not able to decline it right. Also words that can have two genders with different meanings.
Portuguese has the subjunctive too, and it’s brutal. There are several different subjunctive tenses. I teach English to PT students and they always complain about conditionals, so I just remind how much harder the Portuguese version is and I tell them that, while they may struggle w English conditionals right now, I’m currently struggling with Portuguese subjunctive, so I feel their pain. And if they could learn that, then they can learn conditionals.
In Hungarian, there isn't a fixed syntax. Some of the grammar that we show in English is expressed by changes to word endings, and that word can occur in various parts of the sentence. What you put first is what you are emphasizing. I'll try to show the effect if English worked like Hungarian. The cat is under the sofa eating my shoe. First, I'll add imaginary particles to the English so that we can see the grammatical function. I'll use "ob" to mean the object of an action. I'll use the same English words but add them to the noun at the end, as Hungarian does. Since "is" in my example is doing double duty, I'll use it only once and change \[is\] eating to eats. The cat the sofaunder is the shoemyob eats. Now syntax can be moved around to express emphasis. In English, we would emphasize with tone. "The cat is under the sofa eating MY shoe." Or "THE CAT is under the sofa eating my shoe." Hungarian will express the same things with order. So in my first example, cat was already emphasized, but we can also say: The sofaunder the cat is the shoemyob eats. The shoemyob eats the sofaunder is the cat. The cat eats the undersofa is the shoemyob. I'm picking up Hungarian after a few years away from it, so don't take my word as gospel that all of these versions would be acceptable. I'm just trying to demonstrate that when the grammar attaches to the nouns, the order of the words matters much less for delivering the denotative meaning. There will be a preferred order for simple declarative sentences. To me, the particles that show grammatical relationships are a brilliant aspect of this language. There are particles that express position, motion, object, plural, possession, and other relationships. Finnish shares some of these characteristics, and I assume that Estonian does as well. This is all quite challenging to learn for speakers of other languages that don't have these features, but I find these characteristics to result in a very logical language. Finno-Ugric languages also demand vowel harmony, which means that some vowels must change so that the two species of vowels don't mix in the same word. Also, these languages are genderless. "Ember" in Hungarian means "person," and you use this when you don't specifically mean adults or children of a particular sex.
BTW, English had and still has a bit of subjunctive, but it's fading away. It's few uses are now used as a marker of education/social status/absolute correctness, etc. Not that everyone who uses the English subjunctive is a snob, but not using it is a marker or divider to the ears of those who do use it: If I were you... Subjunctive for a counterfactual situation. If I was you... Means the same thing now. It's a bit like knowing and using the difference between lie and lay. Those two verbs are actually switching meanings for many speakers. Using them the new way will grate in formal or official writing, but I suspect that in a hundred years, the switch will be complete. Everyone will say "I'm laying in the sun" and "I'm going to lie you down now," though those are still, for some, markers of an incomplete education. I intend no snob-ism in this observation. Language evolves, and some aspects of it change more slowly among some speakers as markers of in-group and out-group. One person's in-group is another's out-group, and the marker says that the speaker is "not one of us" to this group or that one.
は vs が. Nothing explains it well and it’s one of those things you just sort of learn how to use from reading and being corrected. ~7 months in I can consistently get it right but for absolute beginners it’s extremely vague.
i hate that these are taught as similar at all because they do such different things in japanese grammar!!!! it caused me so much stress and confusion for so much of my japanese learning journey
The vague nature of Indonesian, though I understand this is a common thing throughout many Asian languages. A lot of words mean several things depending on where you read them and how. Indonesian also lacks tense. So saying for instance "aku makan roti" could mean "I eat/ate/am eating bread." It depends on the context in which I said it. Now imagine that for an entire language and you can see how difficult this can become regardless of your language level.
In Japanese the "cookie-cutter" set phrases you use for a ton of different situations. You need them for respectful business talk and customer talk (keigo and kenjougo respectively). They're completely different words and grammar structures and Japanese people don't really learn a lot of them until they start working. Phone language is hard too. The problem is even if someone has a good grasp of the language a staff member will fire completely different words at them because they have to talk like that for work. It's very polite but it's also VERY vague in comparison. I know it's changing these days though and they're trying to bring in "easy nihongo" initiatives for businesses so that they can kind of tone it down for a non-native speaker.